On the Programmers Community Blog there's a post (with quite a bit of feedback) that lists twenty controversial opinions about programming and programmers in general that have been proposed over the years.

One of the very first ideas we had for this blog was to convert some of the wonderful gems of the early era of our site, the undisciplined period, to blog posts. Questions that were once enthusiastically received by the community, but no longer fit Programmer’s scope.

The post has the top twenty answers to the "What’s your most controversial programming opinion?" question as proposed on StackOverflow and includes things like:

Programmers who don’t code in their spare time for fun will never become as good as those that do.

The only "best practice" you should be using all the time is “Use Your Brain".

Not all programmers are created equal.

If you only know one language, no matter how well you know it, you’re not a great programmer.

Your job is to put yourself out of work.

Readability is the most important aspect of your code.

Check out the full post for the complete list...and for the 100+ comments that have been added to it by programmers with both agreeable and disagreeable opinions.

The Symfony project has posted a Top 20 list of the most accessed plugins for the framework, as based on their stats:

A quick look at the analytics of the symfony website tells us a lot about what people need in addition to the symfony core. Here is the top 20 plugins based on the number of page views of the corresponding wiki pages in the last 30 days.

The Symfony project has posted a Top 20 list of the most accessed plugins for the framework, as based on their stats:

A quick look at the analytics of the symfony website tells us a lot about what people need in addition to the symfony core. Here is the top 20 plugins based on the number of page views of the corresponding wiki pages in the last 30 days.

In a new post today, Ed Finkler shares some interesting stats he's generated based on some NIST NVD data and graphed out. It shows PHP as being in the top 20 list for more insecure applications.

What follows is a breakdown of the 20 PHP-based applications that had the highest aggregate vulnerability scores (NIST assigns a score from 1-10 for the severity of each entry), and the highest total number of vulnerabilities, over the past 12 months. Of the two, I feel that the aggregate score is a better indicator of security issues.

The Excelcharts show the total NVD score and the total number of NVD entries for several popular PHP applications (like phpBB, phpMyAdmin, TikiWiki, and Joomla). He also notes that there are some other extenuating circumstances surrounding these numbers (not a level line) and that the trend seems to be more on the side of issues with forums than any other type of PHP application.

In a new post today, Ed Finkler shares some interesting stats he's generated based on some NIST NVD data and graphed out. It shows PHP as being in the top 20 list for more insecure applications.

What follows is a breakdown of the 20 PHP-based applications that had the highest aggregate vulnerability scores (NIST assigns a score from 1-10 for the severity of each entry), and the highest total number of vulnerabilities, over the past 12 months. Of the two, I feel that the aggregate score is a better indicator of security issues.

The Excelcharts show the total NVD score and the total number of NVD entries for several popular PHP applications (like phpBB, phpMyAdmin, TikiWiki, and Joomla). He also notes that there are some other extenuating circumstances surrounding these numbers (not a level line) and that the trend seems to be more on the side of issues with forums than any other type of PHP application.